Creationist Wisdom #619: Evolutionism

Today’s letter-to-the-editor appears in the Spectrum, published in St. George, Utah. It’s titled On evolutionism. The newspaper has a comments feature you can access via an icon below their headline.

We’ve previously remarked about the word “evolutionism.” It shows up often in such letters. All the creationist websites we follow use it, but not as often as they use “Darwinism.” They think that adding “ism” gives the word “evolution” a religious flavor, as with creationism (which is a religion), or Buddhism, or at least a quasi-religious flavor, as with Marxism. It fits with their claim that evolution is a religion founded by Darwin. The word showed up once in a 1994 court decision — PELOZA v. CAPISTRANO UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT — where the judge said:

Peloza [the creationist plaintiff] uses the words “evolution” and “evolutionism” interchangeably in the complaint. This is not wrong or imprecise for, indeed, they are synonyms. Adding “ism” does not change the meaning nor magically metamorphose “evolution” into a religion.

Although it’s childish, both sides can play that game, but if we do it it, we shouldn’t hide the fact that we’re mocking the creationists. In extreme cases, we might refer to their creationist cult as Genesis-ism-ness. Well … that one probably won’t catch on.

Why are we spending so much time on that? First, because words are important. They can either be used to communicate clearly or to generate confusion and misunderstanding. In the right circumstances, it’s worth the effort to point such things out. The second reason is that today’s letter is very short, so we needed to beef things up a bit. Okay, that was the beef, so let’s proceed.

Because the writer isn’t a politician, preacher, or other public figure, we won’t embarrass or promote him by using his full name. He writes a lot of letters-to-the-editor, but that doesn’t qualify for full name treatment. His first name is Michael. Excerpts from his letter will be enhanced with our Curmudgeonly commentary and some bold font for emphasis. Here we go!

Gail Kennedy, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UCLA, said in the movie “Evolution Vs God,” and I quote, “The problem with those who are unable to see evolution, I think is they don’t have imaginations.”

We never heard of her or her movie, nor to we know whether that alleged quote is accurate or what its context was. Let’s read on anyway, to see what Michael does with it:

She is saying evolution has to be “imagined.”

Is she? Who knows? Who cares? Michael cares. He continues:

Why? Because there is zero evidence for it. It has to be “imagined.”

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Zero evidence. Flat out zero! It’s like the conversation between Moses and the burning bush. Here’s more:

You need faith to believe it, making it a religion.

Egad, Michael knows our secret. He knows! Moving along:

Anyone with more than one brain cell can figure that out.

Michael must have two brain cells. He concludes his letter with a powerful argument for his viewpoint:

To say “there is no God” is pure conjecture. Science cannot answer the Creator question. It’s a personal decision, period.

Again! Another dim who does not have the intelligence to DO anything useful to us with their magical woowoo creationism, so has nothing left but to bad mouth evilution which has shown it self to be factual and useful!!!

We’ve previously remarked about the word “evolutionism.” It shows up often in such letters. All the creationist websites we follow use it, but not as often as they use “Darwinism.” They think that adding “ism” gives the word “evolution” a religious flavor, as with creationism (which is a religion), or Buddhism, or at least a quasi-religious flavor, as with Marxism. It fits with their claim that evolution is a religion founded by Darwin.

Creation isn’t a religion, but it’s nevertheless based on and drenched in religion.

As for the flavor issue, creationists want evolution designated as a religion so they can have it banned from public school classroom, while in a masterpiece of hypocrisy they want religion–their religion–brought back in. And they bring up Marxism to get knees jerking by associating “Darwinism” with Communism. This is argument by character assassination. It’s as if someone associated fundamentalism with the KKK–er, wait a minute . . . !

The word hijacking game is a staple of the creationism sales pitch. The interweb could use a proper creationist translator so folks can easily confirm that popular claim of “Literal Interpretation” actually means “Apologetic Embellishment”.